Guidelines on Authorship and Acknowledgements

The Joint NHMRC/AVCC Statement and Guidelines on Research Practice which was published in 1997 gives valuable advice on acknowledgement and co-authorship. These guidelines draw on that document but you should go to the original if you need further detail.

1. Authorship

When it comes to authorship and co-authorship of articles, books, reports and so on, practices vary greatly from discipline to discipline. In the humanities, your Supervisor/s would not generally expect to be listed as a co-author unless they had a direct input into the writing of a given item. In science and technology fields, it is much more usual however for the Supervisor/s to be listed pretty-well automatically. This can be very advantageous as a Supervisor name associated with your work may help people to place you in context and to assess the importance of your work. There are, however, views that Supervisor/s should not be listed simply because they are supervising a student's work.

Here is a section from the Guidelines mentioned above which have been adapted to be relevant across the spectrum of science, social science, and humanities fields.

Authorship is a matter that should not be influenced by the relative power held by the people involved in the research output - seniority or status within the University structure is irrelevant to authorship ranking. Authorship is based on the amount of original work contributed and the responsibility for the output.

Authorship of a research output is a matter that must be discussed between researchers at an early stage in a research project, and reviewed whenever there are changes in participation.

Authorship is substantial participation where all the following conditions are met:

(a) conception of the article, report, book etc., e.g. devising the goals or intellectual structure of the work, and

(b) analysis and interpretation of ideas, materials, data; and

(c) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and

(d) final approval of the version to be published.

Authorship is not justified by:

(a) participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of materials or data;

(b) general supervision of the research;

(c) editing of the research output.

• Any part of an article critical to its main conclusion must be the responsibility of at least one author.
• An author's role in a research output must be sufficient for that person to take public responsibility for at least that part of the output in that person's area of expertise.
• No person who is an author, consistent with this definition, must be excluded as an author without their permission in writing.
• When there is more than one co-author of a research output, one co-author (by agreement amongst the authors) should be nominated as executive author for the whole research output, and should take responsibility for record-keeping regarding the research output.
• The authors must ensure that others who have contributed to the work are recognised in the research output. Courtesy demands that individuals and organisations providing facilities should also be acknowledged.

2. Acknowledgement

It is essential that you acknowledge assistance you receive in your work. Few of the people who help you will qualify as authors, but their assistance may have been crucial in your making progress on your research or your thesis. (Some disputes over intellectual property start because an individual who has not been acknowledged feels aggrieved.)

When you are submitting your thesis or publication you are required to name the people who helped you including anyone who provided editorial assistance. The approach is similar to the way you are expected to acknowledge the formal sources of information, journal articles and so on that you have used.

Whom should you acknowledge? You should mentally "walk through" the process of your research and make a list of all the people who gave you special help. Apart from your Supervisor/s and other academics, think about people such as: photographer; animal attendant; archivist; librarian; another postgraduate student; a contact in an organisation or professional body; wordprocessor; research assistant; editor; lecturer; technical assistant; laboratory assistant or manager.

You should also acknowledge institutions, organisations, and associations which helped you, e.g. with distribution of a survey, doing case studies, with access to specialised material or with funding.

You probably can't (or won't want to) name everyone, but err on the side of generosity. And when you have completed your work, published, graduated or whatever don't forget to contact these people again. You should let them know the outcome of your work. The individuals and organisations you have dealt with will be very pleased to have the feedback and it will reward them for the assistance they have given and made it possible for you to complete your degree or publish. Do this even when you have acknowledged people for assistance as your work has been in progress. This is basic courtesy and it also ensures you maintain the support of those helpers for your academic work and professional life.

July 2000